The VP of PR and Marketing for Bethesda, Pete Hines, made it clear that there won't be initial, out of the box support for mods in Fallout 3.
Be sure and check out the rest of the interview over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
RPS: Getting more technical - care to talk about the mod situation?Certainly some folk are going to be mighty disappointed at this, and perhaps those folk won't understand that mod tools take time to make. Perhaps they'll still only view it as a way to pump out some DLC. Perhaps.
Hines: Folk probably took for granted that every time we make a game, there’s a mod tool. We explained to folk that it takes a lot of time and effort to get that tool ready for release, and it’s not on our schedule right now. We need to get the game done and out. It’s not to say we won’t do it. It’s that right now we have an enormous amount of work to do, for three platforms and all these different languages to get it out around the wall. Right now, we can’t say definitively “there will be mod tools, and here is when they’ll be outâ€. That work remains to be done.
RPS: There’s a Conspiracy Theory that would suggest that you’re removing the mod tools to make downloadable content more attractive. As in, if you get extra value for free, why buy the official stuff?
Hines: That’s a good theory, by the way. And probably on some level it would work… but from our standpoint, whenever we do an Elder Scrolls game and release those mod tools, it takes a ton of work and effort. This is a bigger undertaking for us, and one we’ve not yet scheduled for. Is that to say it’ll never come out? No, I’ll never say that. If we have the time, we’d absolutely like to put them out.(...)
Be sure and check out the rest of the interview over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.